Blaise Pascal Quotes

420 Sourced Quotes

The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.

Blaise Pascal
'God is or he is not.' But to which side shall we incline?…Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate the two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.
Known as Pascal's wager

Blaise Pascal
These five rules [above] form all that is necessary to render proofs convincing, immutable, and to say all, geometrical; and the eight rules together render them even more perfect.

Blaise Pascal
We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Blaise Pascal
It is dangerous to say to the people that their laws are unjust, for they obey them only because they believe them just.

Blaise Pascal
Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

Blaise Pascal
Of the truths within our reach... the mind and the heart are as doors by which they are received into the soul, but... few enter by the mind, whilst they are brought in crowds by the rash caprices of the will, without the council of reason.

Blaise Pascal
Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.

Blaise Pascal
It is necessary to show that there is nothing so little known [as the above rules], nothing more difficult to practice, or nothing more useful and universal.

Blaise Pascal
Few friendships would remain, if each knew what his friend said of him when he wasn't there.

Blaise Pascal
All our dignity consists of thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill. So let us work on thinking well. That is the principle of morality.

Blaise Pascal
Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy. He does not like to hear the truth, and he shuns telling it.

Blaise Pascal
Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble.

Blaise Pascal
Put the world's greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be; if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.

Blaise Pascal
Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be.

Blaise Pascal
The world is satisfied with words: few care to dive beneath the surface.

Blaise Pascal
Our reason is always disappointed by the inconsistency of appearances.

Blaise Pascal
The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Blaise Pascal
We never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

Blaise Pascal
We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.

Blaise Pascal
This art, which I call the art of persuading, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined.

Blaise Pascal
Justice without strength is helpless, strength without justice is tyrannical.... Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

Blaise Pascal
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.

Blaise Pascal
Do not mistake yourself by believing that your being has something in it more exalted than that of others.

Blaise Pascal
To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Blaise Pascal
The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable.

Blaise Pascal
It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

Blaise Pascal
It is a funny sort of justice whose limits are marked by a river; true on this side of the Pyrenees, false on the other.

Blaise Pascal
It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.

Blaise Pascal
This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

Blaise Pascal